Drabbles of Deduction
by rabidsamfan
Summary: Drabbles, and droubbles, and other short ficlets for the BBC's modern Sherlock Holmes, Watson, and any other character who snags my attention.  Spoilers abound!  Rating is for room to play.
1. Therapy

The thing about psychosomatic pain is that it _hurts_.

Which is why, two days into Sherlock's fit of bright blue sulks, John finds himself unable to manage the stairs down from his bedroom without the cane he'd hoped never to need again. Why he drinks his breakfast, except for the little white pill which he knows is only sugar and vitamin A, but which he hopes his misbehaving brain will think is something stronger. Why he slumps into the battered chair in the sitting room and stares at things which only he can see.

Why Sherlock reaches for his violin.


	2. Three for Lestrade: Lost

Five years.

Five years of finding a balance between police procedure and infuriating genius. Five years of knocking a brilliant brat back onto the straight and narrow when he needs it, and learning just when to look the other way. Five bloody _years_ of coming when he's called and tolerating quirks and lectures for the sake of his profession, and then up shows a complete stranger, an _amateur_, with a come-and-go limp and a hero complex, and five hours later Lestrade knows that he has lost the title of "closest thing to a best friend Sherlock Holmes has ever had."


	3. Three for Lestrade: Hidden

He isn't slow. Not in comparison to anyone that isn't Sherlock Holmes. And blanket or not, he knows that Sherlock was making sense last night. So he collects the tapes from the surveillance cameras himself, and checks the timestamps, and supervises the forensics team as they go through the evidence, pushing them hours past the point where they start making mistakes. By the time he has to face the reporters he can safely say that he doubts that anyone will ever know for certain who should properly get the credit for ending the murders. Some mysteries are better left unsolved.


	4. Three for Lestrade: Found

"This is yours." The small, misshapen lump of metal lands neatly in the center of John's palm, still warm from the Inspector's pocket. "Best keep it somewhere safe."

"Won't it be missed?" John asks, closing his fist around the bullet.

"I'm not the one who lost it." Lestrade goes on watching Sherlock dance around the current crime scene, his expression tranquil. "Anderson gets careless when I call in Sherlock. Thinks he doesn't need to cross all the t's and dot all the i's because someone else will do the work for him. But no one's perfect. Not even Sherlock Holmes."


	5. Schadenfreude

The closest thing that Mike Stamford could compare to the insidious joy of introducing someone to Sherlock Holmes, was standing waist deep in an ice-cold lake and shouting to the shore, "Come on in! The water's fine!" The fun of it, in both cases, was watching your friends' expressions when they discovered you were only luring them into making the same mistake you had done. He had to fight back a laugh as John did the equivalent of leaping in with both feet. Lending a phone to Sherlock! Might as well hand him your personal diary and then dance naked whilst he perused it.

That alone would have been enough to make the afternoon amusing. But he had to fight the laughter all the harder when Sherlock rattled off a string of deductions about John's 'brother'. Harry, a _brother?_ Seeing Sherlock Holmes play the fool was icing on a most satisfactory cake. But with a potential flatshare hanging in the balance it wouldn't do to give the man any indication that he was wrong.

His only regret, Stamford thought, as he strolled away from the lab, was that he wouldn't be able to see Sherlock's face when he found out!


	6. Diagnosis

"He was wrong you know," John says one day, and Sherlock doesn't even drag his attention back from the endless patterns of the pedestrian traffic beyond the restaurant window.

"Lestrade is always wrong."

"Not Lestrade. Mycroft." John is watching the patterns too. "How old was he when he told you you were a sociopath? Twenty?"

"Fifteen." Sherlock can hear John's response and quickly adds. "I did doublecheck his research. The symptoms match."

"You were eight years old. And you've been trying to live up to them ever since. I know how that works." John smiles, reluctantly. "Trust me. Look again."


	7. Gwen

When the truth came out, when she learned what she had _done _when she told Jeffrey to take a cab home from the airport, she fainted right there in the office.

A delay! That's all the voice on the phone had wanted from her. Just a delay, so that a transaction could be completed before her lover had a chance to read the papers on his desk. She'd meant no harm. Had intended to use the money for a nice romantic dinner. But now she was the only one who knew the murder _might _not be coincidence.

Time to run.


	8. Two for Sarah: Practice of Medicine

"We'll take you home," John said again, and Sarah worked a hand free of the blanket to place against his chest and stop him in the light from a nearby storefront.

"We'll stop at the clinic first," she ordered, feeling like herself for the first time since she'd been kidnapped. John kept blinking at her, and she could see his Adam's apple bobbing as he fought back nausea. Concussion at the very least. She reached up to the cut on his temple and he flinched away once before settling himself back and waiting, soldier-taut, for her touch. "You need stitches."


	9. Two for Sarah: Forgiveness

"I'm sorry," John said, as Sarah put the bandage into place over her handiwork. "I'm sorry I couldn't... that Sherlock had to be the one to rescue you."

"He didn't, you know." She glanced over to the corner where Sherlock had collapsed into clearly required sleep after delivering an grandiloquent estimation of her medical competence. "I mean, he tried, but you're the one who kept me alive."

"What?" Double vision only made John look more baffled.

"Sherlock went to untie me, but he left me in danger," Sarah said, with a kiss to John's brow. "_You _moved the danger away."


	10. For Andy: Memory and Mourning

It was a small funeral, despite being augmented by some tabloid reporters hoping for a story. Museum people, mostly, and a tiny, elderly Chinese woman who spoke to the coffin at length in tones that Andy tried very hard not to think of as "sing-song". Soo Lin had hated it when people described her dialect that way. "Like bad poetry," she'd said once, her small mouth twisted downwards, when the subject of misinterpretations and stereotypes had come up in the restoration room, and Andy hadn't had the courage to tell her that the sound of Cantonese made him think of music, and of birdpeople discussing the details of wind and feather in terms that would make no sense to the dirtbound people below the trees. He didn't know how to make her understand that he didn't mean it like she was a bird. Just that she was beautiful like one.

At a signal from Mrs. Hathaway, he rose and moved up to the front of the room to begin the tea ceremony, explaining, just as Soo Lin had always done, each step of the ritual to the audience. His hands moved like they were attached to someone else, to someone who knew just how many times to swirl the pot, and just when to push down the lid, to force the hot tea up over the brim. "I asked Soo Lin once, why she would make herself a brew in a 400 year old pot, and she told me some things are meant to be used. But I think she meant that some things are meant to be cared for or they crack and break. To be loved." Andy stopped and looked over to his boss, saw the tears slipping down her dark cheeks. "Some people are like that too."


	11. Detective Work

One day he'd catch him at it, John vowed, staring into a refrigerator bare of everything but assorted condiments and cheap beer. There had been _food_ in there last night at bedtime, actual, real, not-from-a-packet _food_, and he was pretty sure that Mrs. Hudson hadn't popped upstairs to nibble his apricots in the middle of the night. It had to be Sherlock I-don't-eat-when-I'm-working Holmes.

Resigned to choking down marmite and stale biscuits for breakfast, and certain that the current nicotine coma would prevent interruptions, John began plotting. Evidence. That's what he needed.

Time to hide a camera in the pickles.


	12. Evidence

"Look, Sherlock. I've proved it. Not even you can say I haven't proved it."

"But it isn't... It's not logical."

"It doesn't have to be logical! It's true! Isn't that enough? The evidence is all over the kitchen!"

"It's still impossible. If I never fell asleep last night – and I assure you, I didn't – then I can't have gone sleepwalking. Much less all... _that_."

"I watched you doing it! You not only sleepwalked, you slept cooked, slept ate, and slept did the washing up! And then you put the leftovers in the cupboard and the clean dishes in the refrigerator!"


	13. Spoilers for the Great Game:  Coda

_Gun._

_Bomb._

_**Water...**_

It wasn't a matter of thinking. Wasn't a matter of having words connected into sentences in his head. It wasn't even images, flashes of possibility. It was just there. The gun would be fired. The bomb would go off. But the water...

It wasn't a matter of thinking. He was already moving. Watching for the triggerpoint, making sure he didn't throw off Sherlock's aim. And then he had barrelled into Sherlock with a rugby tackle, his bad shoulder screaming, the hellclap of the explosion knocking the air from his lungs.

_**Water...**_

_Cold._

_Darkness._

_Pain._

_Breath._

_Alive._

_**"Sherlock..."**_


	14. Still

They were still underwater when the roof caved in. Still buffeted by the impact of the shock waves travelling through the liquid even though the debris was slowed in its descent. Still trapped in a pocket beneath a great slab of twisted metal and concrete as the water began to slowly filter away through the fractures and cracks created by the explosion. Still racked by layer upon layer of sensation, heat and pressure and flame and cold and darkness and chlorine and bile and blood all clamoring for attention from brains paralyzed by fear and desperate for oxygen.

Still drowning.


	15. Still More

It is John who finds the pocket of air. John, who has never needed to think through all the possibilities to reach a conclusion before acting upon it. John who kicks away the metal strut that has pierced skin and muscle, risking major blood loss in favor of dragging Sherlock's nose and mouth where they can operate as designed. John who is performing an impromptu variation on the theme of resuscitation, pressing intermittently against his diaphragm as if to remind it how to operate. John who is gasping into his ear. "Sherlock, breathe! Breathe, God damn you! Dead is _boring_."


	16. Still Waters

Technically, the water was warm at first. Not that anything would feel warm after the heat of the explosion they'd not entirely avoided. But the heating system was as broken as the building, and the warmth was quick to fade. It wasn't long before Sherlock began to shiver, and John, who had done what little he could to bind the hole in his friend's leg, did what little he could to counteract the insidious combination of shock and blood loss. But the water leeched away even that warmth, and when the firefighters discovered them they were both blue.

And cold.


	17. Staying Still

He is drugged. Pinioned. Blind. His ears hurt, and the sounds he hears are wrong, missing entire octaves of vibration. _I can't play the violin like this,_ he thinks, and then chokes on the tube down his throat when he wants to laugh, because he can't do anything at all, except lie here in the antiseptic darkness, waiting for someone to notice that he is drifting at the edge of consciousness. At least his nose still works, informing him that the hands which arrive to fuss over him belong to a woman, and a woman he knows at that.

_Sarah?_


	18. Still a Freak

Sally Donovan surprised herself by volunteering to take one of the guard shifts at the hospital, and said as much, at length, to the sympathetic lady doctor who had been called in because her card was found in John Watson's wallet. It wasn't an easy job, either, fending off the landlady from Baker Street and the motley assortment of ex-cons and future ex-cons who turned up claiming to be friends of Sherlock Holmes.

Funny that, though. Up till now, she'd have sworn that the only real friend the freak had was the man lying in the bed across the room.


	19. Still a Holmes

It wouldn't be true to say that Lestrade blamed himself. He got plenty of that from Mycroft Holmes, who was, in the Inspector's opinion, the only man in London more insufferable than Sherlock. He'd been catching some shuteye for the first time in three days when that little invitation to disaster had appeared on Sherlock's blog, after all, and he wasn't going to apologize for being human. Particularly not when he'd had the sense – even half-conscious – to correct Mycroft's first over-educated assumption that "The Pool" in question was the one in the Thames.

Too bad they'd still been too late.


	20. Holi Day

Author: rabidsamfan  
Title: Holi Day  
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes may be out of copyright, but he still isn't mine, alas! And the modern Sherlock belongs to the BBC. Sigh.  
Author note: A response to another of the Watson's Woes July 2011 writing prompts: _Celebration of a non-British holiday_

* * *

.

* * *

It was on the way back to the hotel, _after_ leaving the thief that they had come all this way to find in police custody, that Sherlock suddenly cried, "This way, John!" and took off at a run down a crowded alleyway.

John blinked, but followed, and it wasn't until he turned a corner and stumbled headlong into the particoloured crowd of dancers that he thought to wonder what on earth Sherlock was up to. Then Sherlock appeared at his shoulder, teeth white in a face suddenly gone blue, a fistful of coloured powder at the ready.

"Sherlock, wait!"

_*Poof!*_


	21. This is Just to Say

Author: rabidsamfan  
Title: This is Just to Say  
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes may be out of copyright, but he still isn't mine, alas! And the modern Sherlock belongs to the BBC. Sigh.  
Author note: A response to another of the Watson's Woes July 2011 writing prompts: _Wacky, off-the-wall crossover - the weirder, the better._

* * *

.

* * *

This is to just to say  
That I have binned the toes  
Which you had in the refrigerator*

and which you were probably saving for something  
even if they put me off my breakfast.**

Don't bother thanking me.

They were disgusting.  
So round.  
And purple.  
And oozy.

_*Which is to say that I have turned them over to Molly for proper and respectful disposal at the morgue, not wanting a repeat of last month's eyeball incident.***_

_**And no, I will not be purchasing plums at any time in the near future.****_

_***Even if they were actually cow's eyeballs._

_****Or prunes._


	22. Always Miss Something

Author: rabidsamfan  
Title: Always Miss Something  
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, but this version still belongs to the BBC.

* * *

.

* * *

"Colleague?" Sherlock asked.

John's ears reddened. "Yeah, well," he mumbled, "I didn't want that smarmy bastard to cry confidentiality and send me away, so I promoted myself."

Sherlock shook his head a fraction, as if recalibrating his thoughts, one eyebrow flying. "Ah. 'Colleague' implies a need to know, and 'partner' would have been misconstrued, as would 'flatmate'."

"And bankers don't hand 'friends' money." John held out the cheque, shrugging his apology. "One of us ought to be able to pay the rent."

Sherlock ignored the offering. "Keep it," he ordered. "One of us needs to _remember_ to pay the rent."


End file.
